Full of Surprises
by VampirePam
Summary: Set directly after 204, then during 207. Damon goes to Mason's house to make amends, but they end up making out instead. Then something happens to change their relationship forever. Slight AU. This is my first fic, please R&R!  Thanks!
1. An Olive Branch

Maybe it came from finding out he came from a family of werewolves or constantly searching people's reactions to make sure they knew nothing of his secret, but whatever the reason, Mason Lockwood was not easily shocked. It took a lot to truly surprise him. This could account for why his jaw dropped to the floor when he opened the door that night to find Damon Salvatore looking wickedly repentant and holding a bottle of whiskey.

"Olive branch," he said in a low voice, aiming for innocent, but missing the mark by a mile.

"Really? Looks more like whiskey. Moon Mountain Distillery?" Mason couldn't help but chuckle.

"What? I've heard it's a good label." He flashed that famous Damon Salvatore grin, and Mason could see why his devilish charm was all some people could talk about. That the other people could only talk about how he was a pathological liar, psychopath, vampire and murderer, was entirely beside the point.

There were a few moments of silence before Damon interjected, "You going to invite me in, or just take my peace offering and slam the door in my face?"

Mason considered doing just that before deciding he was curious why Damon was there. Besides, they had some unfinished business to take care of.

"I guess you can come in," he replied, feigning disinterest. Damon strolled languidly through the doorframe, making sure to brush by Mason on his way in. He felt a flash of heat in the pit of his stomach, but kept his facial expression carefully set on neutral.

As Damon turned his back to him to walk further into the foyer, Mason picked up the nearest heavy object – in this case a fourteenth century Ming vase (his sister-in-law would not be pleased) – and swung it swiftly at the back of Damon's head. Now it was Damon's turn to be surprised as he hit the floor with an inelegant thud, and, rubbing the back of his scalp, turned around slowly to look at Mason.

"That was for earlier," the werewolf stated, in way of an explanation. "Want a glass of this?" he asked, pointing to the whiskey.

"I feel like I should pour it on the back of my head," shot back Damon, sulking a little.

"I guess that's what happens when you stab someone. They tend to take it personally. You're lucky I didn't break out the silver bullets," Mason quipped, although most of his anger had already dissipated.

Damon glared at him for a few seconds, then accepted the hand Mason was offering and sprang to his feet at vampire speed, at the same time grabbing the bottle of whiskey and sauntering into the kitchen.

"Why are you here, Damon?" Mason asked, as the vampire expertly poured out two glasses and handed one to him.

"I told you already." Damon was looking bored by this point. "I want to make peace."

"Is that an apology for stabbing me earlier this evening?" Mason wanted to stretch this out for as long as (super)humanly possible.

To his surprise, Damon put down his drink and sped over so their faces were mere inches apart. Mason found himself unable to look away as Damon stated, "Yes. I am sorry."

They stood there, eyes locked, for what seemed to Mason like a couple of hours as he once again felt warmth spread throughout his torso, until Damon finally pulled away, explaining casually, "Despite my obvious charms, I have very few friends in Mystic Falls at the moment. It occurred to me that I had wasted an opportunity to make one."

Although his tone was outwardly what Mason assumed was typical Damon – arch, bemused, mocking – there was an undercurrent he couldn't quite place. Sincerity? Sadness? Regret?

"You said earlier you didn't want to be enemies," continued Damon. "And yes, I know that was before I stabbed you with the silver knife," he said quickly, anticipating Mason's protest, "but I was hoping we could just hit the reset button."

Mason hesitated before replying. He decided showing was better than telling, so he slowly removed the denim shirt he'd been wearing.

"I feel like this," he said, gesturing to the bloodied bandage wrapped around his torso, "is not something one should have to put up with from one's friends."

Now it was Damon's turn to look surprised. He considered Mason carefully for a moment, then sped over to him in a blur; it took all of Mason's self control not to jump a few feet in the air – really, this whole vampire super speed thing was distinctly unfair.

Damon slowly, almost gently, placed his hand over the bandage, raising his eyes to look into Mason's.

"I changed my mind. I don't want to be friends," Damon said matter-of-factly.

"No?" responded Mason, trying to keep his voice steady and casual.

"Nope." Damon smiled that wicked grin again and, wrapping his fingers in Mason's hair, pulled him into a long, hard kiss.

No, Mason Lockwood was not easily surprised. Before his brain shut off entirely, he mused briefly that he now had to make an exception for Damon Salvatore, who was clearly capable of infinite surprises.


	2. Just Friends

**Author's Note: I know some of you wanted them to go further in this chapter, but I wanted to solidify their dynamic a bit further first. Smut later, I promise! **

Mason blamed Damon's considerable skill with his tongue and the fact that he hadn't had sex with anyone for seven months (dear God, that long?) for it taking him two full (and if he was being honest, amazing) minutes to push the vampire off of him.

"What the hell was that?" Mason demanded, trying in vain to calm his ragged breathing.

"What?" Damon asked coyly, "Didn't you like it?"

"It's not a question of whether I liked – stop trying to distract me! I thought you were straight!" Mason didn't know why this popped into his head, but it would suffice until he figured out how to breathe again.

"Straight, gay, such limiting human labels, don't you find? I'm 150 years old and easily bored, Mason, there isn't much I haven't tried." Damon was smiling somewhat patronizingly at him, like he was some naïve kid in sex ed class asking all the obvious questions.

Head still reeling from the kiss and this new information, Mason managed to blurt out, "You don't just go around kissing people you tried to kill in the same day!"

"Really, you don't?" inquired Damon, in mock shock, "I do it all the time." His enjoyment at Mason's bewilderment was all too obvious.

Mason let out an unintelligible shout of frustration as he reached for his discarded shirt, hoping (mostly) that achieving a more dressed state would discourage Damon from further overtures. Damon sent him a look that conveyed his opinion on the futility of the gesture. This could not be good.

Hoping to distract the ridiculously good-looking vampire eyeing him as if he had a gaping head wound, Mason asked, "So was all that nonsense about not having friends just a way to get into my pants?"

Damon opened his mouth to answer, clearly intending a witty comeback, but what came out was simply, "No."

Just when Mason thought he couldn't find the vampire any more surprising, he mused, there comes a moment of complete honesty.

Damon seemed to realize he'd let his guard down and became once more his cocky self, staring intently at Mason as he strolled nonchalantly into the kitchen to pick up his drink.

"I would be willing to give it a try," called out Mason, "but what exactly were you thinking?" Damon's eyes flashed as he reentered the room, conveying precisely what he was thinking, so Mason added quickly, "As friends, Damon, just friends."

Damon looked like he wanted to reply, but turned away instead, brow furrowed. He sipped his whiskey reflectively.

A thought struck Mason suddenly. Had Damon ever actually had a real friend? The tentative peace he had broached with Stefan didn't count. Neither did his love/hate relationship with that bitch Katherine. Maybe Elena, but the whole him killing her brother thing he had heard about from Tyler seemed to put a distinct damper on that.

The idea of it seemed so sad to him that he instinctively reached out his hand for Damon's shoulder, catching himself just in time. Damon was centuries old, he had to remind himself, and perfectly capable of making a friend if he wanted one.

"I guess we could do a round of Guitar Hero, since we never got to play at the barbecue," Mason offered, extending his own olive branch.

Damon's eyes lit up again, this time not with the sexual appetite of an adult male, but rather with the unbridled delight of a little boy asked to play his favorite game.

Mason smiled and walked toward the television to set up the game. As he drew nearer to the Playstation 3, he felt a hand on his shoulder. As Mason turned around with the express intent of passing Damon the red plastic guitar in his hand, he barely had time to react before Damon's hands were on the sides of his face, lips pressed once again to his, full of the same devouring hunger as before, but this time fully controlled.

The kiss was over in seconds and Mason's vision cleared to find Damon smiling pleasantly at him. "Don't think me taking you up on your kind offer of friendship means I've given up on anything more," the vampire warned. He then continued smiling as innocuously as was possible for Damon, gently lifted the guitar Mason vaguely remembered he was still holding with a quick word of thanks, and positioned himself on the other side of the room in playing stance.

Mason dimly realized that Damon was already winning and they hadn't even started to play. That had to change.


	3. Heartbreak Warfare

**Author's Note: Hey everybody, I'm so, so sorry this took me so long to update! I wanted to go in the direction the show was going with the two of them and that just blew everything up. "Plan B" made me so mad and confused, so I put this aside for some other projects for a little while. Because of the whole, well, **spoiler** Damon killing Mason thing, I had to make this chapter pretty angsty, but I have hope things will get better later. It's slight AU from necessity, but I tried to keep the tone of the scene the same. Hope you guys can hang in there with me until things get a bit less bleak for these two! I might have to make an added chapter of what happened in the time between Chapters 2 and 3 to make everyone feel better. **

_A few weeks later…_

_How the hell did it come to this?_ Mason wondered briefly to himself, before the hot slash of pain from the poker forced his thoughts elsewhere. He could blame Damon all he wanted for his current situation, but he was the one who had lied. He was the one who had betrayed Damon to the one person in the world who really knew how to hurt him. He was the one who caused that spark of humanity he had started seeing in Damon's eyes to change into hot black fury. This was his fault.

Damon plunged in the poker over and over again, as if trying to obliterate every happy moment the two had shared together over the past few weeks and convince himself that Mason was his enemy, not his friend, not something even more intimate. There were many such memories for him to overcome, and these were what ran across Mason's mind: the two of them in the wood-paneled Lockwood game room, drinking Scotch, throwing darts, making out on the pool table; the two of them zooming down the back-roads of Mystic Falls in Damon's sleek black sports car (although if he was honest with himself they spent more time in the back seat than the front). It was only now that Mason fully realized what he was giving up.

Finally, Damon took a small break from stabbing him to yell at him, which Mason realized with a sinking feeling was going to hurt even worse. "So this was all just a game for you, was it?" He ran an agitated hand through his thick black locks and paced back and forth as he continued, "A fun little game you and Katherine were playing with me, except I didn't know the rules. No, no, I thought it was real, all real! Little Damon Salvatore, all excited over having someone like a pathetic schoolboy! How you and Katherine must have laughed about that one, really howled over it, no pun intended."

A cold, crashing wave of realization hit him as he remembered what Damon had said to Liz in the cellar, when Mason had handed him over to the Council. _"I thought you were my friend." _Everyone had thought at the time he was talking to Liz, but he wasn't. No, it dawned on Mason, remembering that he had been standing directly behind Liz, Damon had been speaking only to him. That vulnerable, heartbroken look on Damon's face that even then had cut deep had been caused by his betrayal and his alone.

Wanting to explain, to comfort, to deny, Mason started, "Damon, I –", but Damon cut him off furiously.

"Oh no, you do not get to explain. You don't get to say 'I'm sorry' or 'I didn't mean it' or 'It started out like that but I really came to feel something –'. No. You are not going to play on my feelings for you to get out of this one."

God, what had he done? Damon had spent two hundred years building walls to keep out the pain he felt about Katherine, the humanity he felt about loving her, and in a few short weeks Mason had managed to break them down and force him to build new ones so high and strong Mason genuinely wondered if anyone would ever be able to breach them. The stupid part, the really stupid part was that he had done all for this for Katherine, whom he realized now as he should have then had only been using him. Not just using him, but actually planning on killing him to get some bad guys off her back. He had hurt Damon, someone he cared for and who cared for him, for someone to whom he meant nothing; for that he would never truly forgive himself.

Damon's pacing had grown more frantic and his gestures more frenetic. "I should kill you," he yelled, "You didn't blink an eye at dosing me and Stefan with vervane and exposing us to the Council, and given half a chance you probably would again. You were screwing my worst enemy and telling her all my secrets, things I thought I was revealing to the one person in the world whom I could trust absolutely. I should tear you apart piece by piece until there's nothing left! I should, I should –"

Damon let out an anguished scream and hurled the poker against the wall with such force that it shattered in two. In one swift motion, he ripped off the chains binding Mason to the chair and threw them to the ground. Walking shakily toward the center of the room, he said softly, almost in a whisper, "I can't. It's stupid and weak, but I just – can't. So go."

Feeling like his heart was breaking in two, Mason pleaded with him, "Damon, please, I –"

"Go, for God's sakes, just go! Get out of here!" he screamed. Damon felt the angry tears that had been welling up in him begin to stream down his face, and he turned quickly toward the fireplace.

Mason wanted to tell him everything: that he couldn't bring himself to sleep with Katherine after the night Damon had kissed him and changed everything; that he saw past Damon's snarky, bad boy exterior to the romantic, lonely guy beneath; that betraying him was the worst thing he had ever done to anyone. Seeing him break like that, Mason wanted so badly to hold him and tell him that everything he said he felt was real and he was sorry and everything would be all right, but he knew that couldn't happen now, maybe ever. Instead, he walked dejectedly toward the doorway, turning finally to Damon and saying,

"I know it doesn't mean anything now, but I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. And I'll find a way to show you that, I swear it. This isn't the end – I won't let it be. Goodbye for now, Damon."

After a few beats, Damon turned to reply in spite of himself, but by then Mason was gone, vanished into the night as Damon himself had done so many times. Left completely alone once more, Damon sank to his knees and finally let himself weep openly, for himself, for Mason, for what he believed could never be and for what may never even have been in the first place.


End file.
